Category: Drama/Playwriting

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 4 – Voices [updated]

Well playwrights, we’re doing it! We have settings, we have characters, we have characters moving around inside of settings doing their business. I think it’s high time we let them speak, don’t you?

Day 4 – Give Them Voices: Invent some sort of antagonistic relationship for the two characters you have been working with. For each character, write a 3-minute (about a single-spaced typed page) monologue, addressed to the audience. The characters should describe each other, and give their point of view of the relationship of the two characters. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

So, what is a monologue? It’s just a fancy word for any time a character gets to talk at length without interruption, either to the audience or to another character. In their monologues, each of your characters should demonstrate a unique voice, based on (1) what he or she chooses to talk about (content), (2) the words and phrases used (syntax), and (3) speech idiosyncrasies (vocal patterns). Does the character mumble? Whine? Is his speech punctuated with grunts and sighs? Does she ramble or talk in a sing-song way? Does every sentence sound like a question?

The authors of The Playwright’s Handbook encourage new playwrights to become collectors of interesting vocal patterns. How? Shameless eavesdropping! I read or heard someone recently say that a person was as “ugly as homemade sin.” Let me tell you, I could not grab my pen and notebook fast enough. The phrase–vaguely southern, with undertones of religion, equating the beautiful with the good, and perhaps preferring things store-bought to those homemade–evokes a place, a time, a culture, maybe even a social status. We know (or think we know) half a dozen things about the speaker from that phrase alone.

Have fun writers! See you tomorrow as we prepare to write our first scene.

[updated]

Here are the monologues I wrote for my characters Allister Frisbie and Collum MacElroy:

AL
So this guy walks into the Arrowhead yesterday–older guy, my dad’s age, I guess, if he was still alive. So what, 80? 85? And I can see right away this guy’s homeless. No, no, not homeless homeless. But he’s lost his place, right? His morning place. I can just see this guy, hunkered down on a red vinyl barstool at some old-school diner, every day for 20, 30 years, ordering the same black coffee, cracking open the morning paper. Then one day there’s a sign: “Under New Management.” And all of a sudden they’re rippin’ out the bar, fixin’ up the place with big-screen TVs playing international soccer, serving up frappuccinos and macchiatos. But this isn’t Chicago, this isn’t Detroit. People aren’t lingering in coffee shops on their way to work, man. Nah, they’re gettin’ in their cars, queuing up the podcast, and slipping into gridlock on the freeway. They want drive-through service, double lanes, in and out. So the place limps on a while, but then, one morning, the kiss of death:  a “Space For Rent” sign. And bam, the old dude’s homeless. He’s got nowhere.

Now, I feel for the guy, really I do. But here he comes strolling into the Arrowhead and, I gotta say, that’s my place. Sounds silly, I know, but I got my table by the window, my paintings on the wall. Cheryl sees me walking in and hollers out, “Hey Al, I’ll bring it right around.” I don’t wait in line here. They know what I’m having. Hell, the concoction’s named after me, right there on the chalkboard: “The Frisbie”–a latte with dark-steeped turmeric tea. I know, it sounds nasty, but the name’s catchy, right? People order it all the time. And they like it! Turmeric’s a natural anti-inflammatory. Did you know that? Good for the joints. People don’t pay attention to their joints. Then one day, they’re 80 years old, shuffling into a strange coffee shop, stooping to look under a broken table, and wishing they’d paid attention to their joints.

So back to this guy. I could tell he wasn’t really into the place. I get it. I felt the same way at first. But the Arrowhead, man it grows on you. It’s the kind of place that folds you in, right? You feel like you’re stirred into some great bubbling soup. Like it called for a dash of you in the recipe all sling.

So, yeah, I think. Just fine. Let’s stir the old man right in. No problem. He’s got the making of a real regular. A steadfast old dude. But then, this morning, I walk in at my regular time, and this new guy, he’s sitting in my seat. Cheryl shrugs at me, like, “What’s to be done, Al?” And I don’t know what, but I’ll tell you this much. Something. Something’s gotta be done.

* * *

MAC
Allister Frisbie. Sounds British, doesn’t it? Stuffy. Whatever. I know an Al when I see one. What did I think of him? I thought he was a prick, okay? I guess he’s a real celebrity around her; bigshot lawyer, charitable, well-liked. He’s got a nice hobby–that I’ll grant him–people like to look at his paintings. But I could tell, right from the get-go, he was just a small-town bigshot, a big fish in a little pond. Man’s got a complex. They name some disgusting foamy tea after him, peg his pictures on the wall, and you’d think the guy was some exotic turbaned prince flown in on a magic carpet. People like that. It’s exactly why I didn’t care to try this place, if you must know.

But a man’s gotta have his morning coffee. And not from a drive-through window! Kids are whining and crying about the landfills, what are we going to do about the landfills?! Yeah, I know there are swirling masses of shopping bags in the South Pacific, baby sea turtles impaled on plastic straws or whatever nonsense. But then you see them idling in their cars for 15 minutes, air conditioning blasting, and they order drinks the size of swimming pools–plastic cup, plastic lid, plastic straw, little paper straw wrapper and receipt paper floating away on the breeze. Hypocrites.

And the mermaid? It’s got two tails. Has anyone stopped to think about that? Utterly wrong for swimming. I mean, why not legs, if you insist on two of the things? And the name. The place may or may not be called after the ship’s first mate in Moby Dick. Okay, well which one is it? You don’t even know what your multi-billion-dollar business is named after? Did that detail just slip your mind? I’d sooner die than drink coffee from that place.

I’ll tell you this much, no one at Delia’s would have pulled this business about the window seat. Delia’s was strictly first come, first served. I mean, what, are we babies on the playground? Is your name on the seat on a little gold plaque? No? Then quit being a child and sit somewhere else! But of course by then it was morning rush and there was no place else. Damn it! what did he expect me to do? Jump up and courtesy? Back out of the room bowing like he was the King of England? I told him if he wanted his swamp water tea so damned bad he’d better take it to go or suck it up and pull up a chair.

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 3 – Business [updated]

Okay playwrights, as we move into Day 3 of our workshop we have drawn from our memory and our present observations to come up with a “present setting” and a “past setting,” a “present character” and a “past character.” Now we are going to mix things up. “Business” is the word for the physical activities of a character on the stage, and its time for our characters to get busy.

Day 3 – Put the Characters in the Settings: Place the “present character” in the “past setting.” Have the character perform a simple, specific piece of business with some part of the setting that reveals something about both who the character is and why the character is in the environment. Describe the activity in a short paragraph. Repeat the exercise, describing the “past character” performing a piece of business in the “present setting.” Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

In a play, stage directions help the actors figure out what they should be doing besides engaging in dialogue. Think about what items a character in this setting would have around to interact with. Practice observing people in your life or strangers you encounter and jotting down things that they do. Pay attention to the way the waiter clears the tables, the way the librarian shelves books, the way people prepare to go out in the rain or cold. How does a woman search in her bag for something she thinks she’s lost? How do people eat, drink, clean up after themselves (or not)? How do they read the Sunday paper? What little rituals or odd habits do people have that tell us something about them?

Think in bold, simple strokes. Complex activities get “muddy” onstage and the audience will lose interest trying to figure out what your character is doing. And remember, if your character and setting don’t seem to go together, no cheating! That is part of the challenge.

[updated]

Mac bursts through the door of the Arrowhead Café, scowling up at the jingling bell that sounds his entrance. It’s the morning rush and there’s a line of commuters waiting to place their orders. Another group stands around poking and swiping at their phones while they wait for their drinks. Mac purses his lips and turns to go but is blocked by a woman trying to maneuver a giant double stroller through the door. Seeing no one else move to help, he hops forward and swings the door wide for her, giving a tight little nod in response to her exaggerated display of gratitude.

Mac lets the woman go ahead of him and, turning back to the door, swings it open and shut a few times, squinting at the pressurized door closer and fingering a spot on the wall where the handle is starting to go through the drywall. He flips open a little spiral notebook and scribbles something in it with a pencil he pulls from behind his ear. With a sigh, Mac glances at his watch and moves forward to stand in line. Military “at ease,” he stands with his feet apart, his hands clasped loosely Behind him. He winces in acknowledgment at the sticky-faced toddler who cranes her neck to gape at him from the stroller.

As the line moves slowly forward, Mac’s attention is drawn to the framed artwork on the wall. He leans close, wrinkling his nose as if he’s smelled something bad or shaking his head in disbelief. When he comes to the last piece, however, his face goes blank, his shoulders relax, and he just stands there, with an almost serene look on his face. The girl at the counter has to call out to him to get his attention. Embarrassed, he orders a small black coffee to go. His eyes return for a moment to the painting. The girl slips him something with his change and he holds it out to her, confused. “What …” “The artist,” she explains. It’s a business card. He shakes his head, moves to return it to her, but the line has moved forward. He slips the card in his pocket.

As he waits for his coffee, Mac leans against a nearby table. It tilts abruptly and he frowns at it, crouching to inspect where the legs meet the base. He pulls a little multi-use tool from his wallet and tightens the screw, giving the table a good shake to make sure he’s fixed it. The girl appears. “Well look at that! Tomorrow’s is on the house.” She hands him his coffee. Mac nods and walks past her, taking one last look at the painting by the register. He leaves the café with a faraway look on his face, as if he’s just remembered something he forgot long ago.

* * *

Allister Frisbie walks into the empty living room from the glow and commotion of the adjoining kitchen. He is humming “Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree” as he makes his way around the room, dropping dirty paper plates and napkins into a large trsh bag. He dips the last shrimp in the dish of cocktail sauce and eats it in one bite, tossing the tail into the bag and makes his way back to the tree, where he stoops to pick up balls of crumpled wrapping paper. He stacks the toys strewn about in neat piles. When he comes to one toy he stops, a look of pure nostalgia on his face.

Frisbie drops the bag and holds the gift out in front of him. It’s a hinged wooden box with a little brass handle. He carries it to the bar, clears a space for it, and lifts the lid. It’s a child’s art set. A really extravagant one. He fingers the supplies, pulling some out to check their labels before returning them. There are watercolors, chalk pastels, sticks of charcoal, little squares of patterned paper for origami, and, set into the lid, tubes of oil paint. Frisbie plucks a little wooden palette out with his index finger and thumb, then quickly lays it flat on the bar when he realizes it’s heavy with wet paint. The lucky recipient of this art set seems to have squirted a few tubs of paint out and then promptly given up on a career in the arts. Frisbie tisks and shakes his head. He looks from the palette to the trash bag but then seems to change his mind. Instead, he tears a large piece of cardboard from a crushed box and, pulling a stool to the bar and pouring himself some eggnog, selects a brush from the box and dips it into the paint.

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 2 – Characters [updated]

Hi playwrights! In Day 2 we move on from settings to characters, but stick with the idea of drawing inspiration both from our memories and our present-day observations.

Day 2 – Characters: Write a short, pithy paragraph about how a present stranger you observe (the ‘present character’) and a person you were close to that you haven’t seen for some time (the ‘past character’) dress. Then, based on your observations and recollections, write a brief personality profile/life history for both the ‘present character’ and the ‘past character.’ Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

Start with the basics: name, age, physical description and dress (in one or two sentences). Then briefly describe the character’s relationship to one or more other characters, a sentence or two about a major event or theme in the character’s life up to this point, and a word or two about what the character is like. Curmudgeonly? Cloying? Does she constantly make lists and jot things down that she wants to remember later? Is he overeager, just a little too excited about everything? Is she quiet and reserved, always letting others talk over her?

And remember who your reader is. An audience will never hear these words. It’s the actors who will read them and, putting them together with the dialogue you’ve written, breathe life into the characters on the page. Just as you did with your setting descriptions, include concrete details but not so much description that your actors will feel trapped by what you’ve written. And keep the physical descriptions pretty general, so that lots of different actors could play the role.

[updated]

Present Character: Collum “Mac” MacElroy, 83 years old, is dressed in loafers, khakis, and a blue chambray shirt. For 55 years he has donned this same outfit, parked his Oldsmobile sedan in the same spot on the 6th floor of the parking garage, and produced a fistful of jingling keys to unlock the frosted glass door that reads “MacElroy Engineering.” Mac is an old-school engineer, employing pocket protectors and slide rules with no sense of irony. He works out problems on graph paper, sitting at a massive tilted drafting table in his modest office, and then passes them off to the young men in his employ, who clack their key boards and shuffle their corded mice, turning his elegant diagrams into lifeless digitizations. Feeling nostalgic, Mac occasionally insists on using the old blueprint machine, filling the air with the acrid smell of ammonia. He has watched the slow decline of the once-vibrant downtown around him and is acutely aware that his is one of only a few remaining businesses in the old brick mid-rise buildings on Main Street.

Past Character: Allister Frisbie, 62 years old, wears dark jeans and a Celtic music festival T-shirt. He carries a corduroy blazer in case he needs to make himself presentable but rarely puts it on. Frisbie’s once red hair has gone gray but still falls in thick waves across his forehead. He is near-sighted, often removing his wire frame glasses to twirl them in one hand while reading. A regular at the Arrowhead Café, Frisbie reads the morning paper front to back over a large mug of Ginger tea. A criminal defense lawyer who once mounted an unsuccessful campaign to become a circuit court judge, Frisbie is also an artist. His oil paintings and woodcut prints line the walls of the café. He enjoys watching, unnoticed, as people stop to look at his artwork. Out of respect, the staff of the Arrowhead make it a point never to “out” him to their other clientele.

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Playwriting Workshop – Day 1 – Setting [updated]

Hello playwrights! Ready to jump into the next challenge? If you need a refresher on what we’re up to this month, check out the challenge description. I will post the daily writing exercises or play discussions each morning, but if you are an even earlier riser than I am or want to work out of order or work ahead, I will also post the exercises ahead of time here.

So without further ado, here is the first exercise in our Week 1 Beginner’s Playwriting Workshop:

Day 1 – Setting: Explore several settings, at least one public and one private. Also try to find one setting that is unfamiliar to you. Concentrate on the physical setting; filter out any people or activities. Using all five senses, jot down as many details as possible. Now do this again, from memory, for a setting from your past. From the lists, write two short descriptions, one for a setting you observed and one for a setting from your memory. Adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn (Revised Edition, 1996).

Some thoughts on this. Remember that theater is a collaborative art. Keep your setting descriptions lean, including only the essential details. If you describe every last thing, you deprive future set designers or theater companies the ability to interpret what you have written in their own ways. You’ll notice the setting description in this week’s reading “Death of a Salesman” is only a page long. It is also the only setting description in the whole play. The details are chosen carefully. (“As more light appears, we see a solid vault of apartment houses around the small, fragile-seeming home.” … “On a shelf over the bed a silver athletic trophy stands.”)

[updated]

Here are the two settings I came up with:

Present Setting: The Arrowhead Café
A small coffee shop, door in front, counter in back. Against one wall is a worn leather couch and battered coffee table. A large sign spells “COFFEE” in old-fashioned round lightbulbs. Half a dozen tables for two with mismatched chairs are scattered around a long studio table with reclaimed pews for benches. A tinkling bell over the door can be heard over the growl and sputter of the espresso machine. A newspaper is snapped open. There is a dull roar of conversation, the soft flurried keystrokes of someone typing on a laptop, and the clink of spoons and cups against saucers. In a bowl by the register are craft items for purchase, some hats and scarves knitted from yarn thick as macaroni noodles. The place smells of fresh-ground coffee, ginger and turmeric tea. The sugared tops of scones on a footed plate sparkle in the light above the cash register.

Past Setting: Home for the Holidays
A dark paneled living room is crowded with furniture: a worn sofa and La-Z-Boy chair joined by a dozen or so stools, ottomans, and folding chairs. The carpet is an old remnant, in a busy pattern that matches nothing. The dual focal points of the room are a small wood-burning stove in one corner, framed by two dozen or more red stockings, and, next to it, a squat fir tree loaded with vintage ornaments and lights and dwarfed by piles of presents. On a little Formica bar rest a jug of eggnog, a metal nutcracker, and assorted finger foods: bowls of nuts, cocktail shrimp and sauce, toothpicked party wieners, heaping platters of Christmas cookies under tight-wrapped cellophane. There is laughter in the kitchen next door. A dog whines to be let out. The door to the kitchen, just visible at the edge of the stage, opens and closes with a whoosh. Clinking six-packs of Coca-Cola bottles are produced and distributed to squealing children. It’s almost time to begin.

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July Playwriting Workshop – Preview

Hi writers, are you ready for a new monthly challenge? How about a summer playwriting workshop? I’m a pretty regular theatergoer and sometimes, when I have an idea for a story, I think, wow, that might actually be a cool play. Small problem: I have no idea how to write a play. I looked into taking a class and there are a few, but they’re pretty pricey and don’t always meet at convenient times. So I’m going to give myself a one-month crash course in playwriting. Sound fun?

Here’s the plan. We’re going to do daily writing exercises adapted from The Playwright’s Handbook, by Frank Pike and Thomas G. Dunn. (Note: this book appears to be out of print, but used copies can still be found. You don’t need to find a copy to follow along with what we’re doing here.) In Week 1 we’ll do some warm-up exercises to get us thinking about characters, setting, dialogue, and conflict. In Week 2 we’ll do intermediate-level scene-writing exercises. And in Weeks 3 and 4 we’ll work on the first draft of a full-length play.

We are also going to be reading and thinking about a few plays. I’ll post comments about a new one each Saturday, starting on Saturday, July 7. If you want to follow along, here are the plays. We’ll start with Death of a Salesman because it is easy to get your hands on quickly (most libraries have a few copies and the Kindle download is only a few dollars). I was able to get the others by interlibrary loan, but they are also available on Amazon and your local bookstore can order them for you. I tried to select a mix of plays from different time periods, involving different types of relationships (friends, siblings, spouses), written by both male and female playwrights.

Playwriting Workshop Reading List

  • July 7, 2018: Death of a Salesman, by Arthur Miller (1949) – learn more about the play here
  • July 14, 2018: Topdog Underdog, by Susan-Lori Parks (2001) – learn more about the play here
  • July 21, 2018: Look Back in Anger, by John Osborne (1956) – learn more about the play here
  • July 28, 2018: Art, by Yasmina Reza (1994) – learn more about the play here

I’m excited to start this challenge. I hope you’ll join me on Sunday!